The Pirate Bay is no stranger to making history, and today is no different. In an achievement that conjures an achievement from the annals of file-sharing history, The Pirate Bay has broken an impressive milestone. Today, The Pirate Bay asserts itself as the self-proclaimed "World's Largest Tracker" by topping over 10 million peers, while managing over 1 million torrents.

Let's consider these staggering numbers. 10 million simultaneous users represents a number never duplicated by any file-sharing entity. The largest P2P networks, such as FastTrack and eDonkey2000, both topped out with approximately 5 million users. Gnutella, fronted by LimeWire, is more difficult to calculate, however reasonable estimates place Gnutella's population among the P2P heavyweights. Despite these impressive stats, The Pirate Bay has managed to exceed all previous file-sharing populations.

10 million users is more than the population of New York City (8.1 million) and The Pirate Bay's home country, Sweden (9 million). To imagine the scale of The Pirate Bay's ubiquity, it would be similar to every person in New York City running a BitTorrent application and using The Pirate Bay as their tracker - and even then, there would still be 2 million individuals to spare. Skype manages to have similar ambitions to The Pirate Bay; as of the time of this writing, the VoIP P2P network has approximately 9.1 million individuals connected - but still short by 1 million users.

The Pirate Bay has also managed to break another achievement, as the BitTorrent tracker is now managing over 1 million torrents. Specifically, The Pirate Bay's statistics show that "10.044.335 peers" are currently connected, with "1.015.489 torrents" managed by the tracker.

"We're very happy to be part of all of this and we hope our users keep sharing those files!," Peter Sunde of The Pirate Bay told Slyck.com. "And we're looking to break 20 million as well."

The Pirate Bay's journey to this milestone was interrupted in late May of 2006, when it's server farm was raided by Swedish authorities. Its machines were confiscated, leaving many to wonder if the tracker would ever return. To put matters in perspective, The Pirate Bay had only 2.1 million peers during those events. Now, The Pirate Bay's server farm is scattered globally, giving the administration, and indeed many of its users, the confidence that it will be immune from any future prosecution.

That confidence is under attack by entertainment industry, pressured ISPs, and governments world wide who are attempting to thwart that critical mass of users. ISP bandwidth throttling and filtering could be on the way shortly, with the aim of cracking down on the productivity of the file-sharing community. Despite this pressure, concerns are held in check with the knowledge that history is on the opposition's side.